Who is this man Jesus who comes from Nazareth? 

Today’s Gospel reading, in which this Nazarene instructs Mary of Bethany to save her costly oil for his own burial rather than selling it to procure alms for the poor, thrusts this difficult question to the fore. While this question emerges quite explicitly in today’s reading, in reality, this question is being raised on every page of Sacred Scripture. The question of Jesus’s identity is not simply one query among many others. It is the central question of the Christian life.

Christ, Messiah, Savior, Suffering Servant, Logos, Son of Man, Son of God, God. We Christians employ and listen to others employ these terms so often to describe Jesus that we can easily lose sight of the real difficulty, and even danger, that the question of Jesus’s identity presents to us. “We already know who Jesus is,” we may permit ourselves to think, “so now let’s get on with the work of accomplishing what Jesus has asked us to accomplish. Let’s stop sitting around contemplating and start building this Kingdom of God as Jesus exhorts us.” 

The problem with such thinking, of course, is that we do not already know who Jesus is. This central question of the Christian life is so deep and so rich that in this life we are only ever, at the very best, on the way to understanding the marvelous and bewildering identity of this man. The question of Jesus’s identity is one which we must perpetually wrestle with and even ask ourselves anew throughout the course of our earthly pilgrimage.

And in today’s Gospel, we cannot ignore what arises as a great challenge to Jesus’s messianic and divine identity: How can this man Jesus, who with his overwhelming power has just raised Lazarus from the dead, say to Mary “You will always have the poor with you”? What sort of salvation has this man brought to the world if 2,000 years after his ministry we still see millions, if not billions, of people suffering from great material and mental impoverishment? And relatedly, how can this Nazarene honestly assert that his own burial is of greater importance than three hundred days’ wages worth of relief for the poor?

A serious grappling with these questions will help us to disabuse ourselves of one very alluring misconception about the identity of Christ Jesus and His Church. In light of Jesus’s words and actions in this part of John’s Gospel, we see quite clearly that any way of thinking which reduces Christ to simply a social reformer and the Church to merely a humanitarian organization is greatly mistaken. Jesus certainly does teach that his followers ought to care for the needs of the poor and the outcast, but providing for the world’s material needs is not and cannot ever be the Church’s primary purpose. 

What emerges from Christ’s stern words today, “Leave her alone . . . keep this for the day of my burial . . . you do not always have me,” is the truth that the proper and primary work of the Church on earth is not material, but spiritual: the facilitation of an encounter with the crucified and risen Lord and the transformative grace of the Holy Spirit, an encounter which is not one-time, static, and complete, but which leads us little by little to that ultimate Encounter in which our most puzzling questions shall be answered not by logic and syllogism but the tender gaze of love.